HOW CAN YOU COMMUNICATE WITH WEB SERVER (APACHE OR IIS) FROM COLDFUSION?

How can you communicate with web server (Apache or IIS) from Coldfusion?

Posted on 6 years ago

Cold Fusion is an example of a Common Gateway Interface application.
The Common Gateway Interface is a mechanism to allow Web servers, which
are designed to serve static documents, to receive dynamic output from
programs and serve it as if it were static data.

1. When a
browser sends a request for a Cold Fusion template to a Web server,
several things must happen. First, the Web server recognizes the
information from the browser as a request for CGI output.
2.If the
request was initiated from a form, the server has to write the form
field information to some area in storage that is accessible to other
programs on the machine. Usually, this is done by using STDOUT data
streams. The WinCGI interface, which can be used by WebSite and other
servers, writes the form data to INI-style files on disk, which are
then opened and read by the CGI application.
3.The CGI program
requests data from the data source, which is returned in step
4. The
CGI program formats the data as HTML output, returning this output to
the server in step
5. The server receives this output, performs any
further server-side processing necessary, and then sends it to the
browser.

Cold
Fusion defaults to using server API modules instead of CGI to
communicate between the Web Server and ColdFusion Application Server.